My holiday with Monsieur Hulot

When Jacques Tati began work on Playtime he had made only three feature films in nearly 20 years, Jour de Fête, M Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle. But for many he already ranked among the greatest of comic directors, his M Hulot nudging for position alongside Chaplin's tramp.

He now decided that it was time M Hulot was launched boldly into a gigantic modern setting. In 1963, switching from 35mm to 70mm, Eastmancolor, stereophonic sound - hefty stuff for its day - he began constructing a huge fragment of a modern city, with an airport, motorways and office blocks, in a field outside the Saint Maurice film studios, east of Paris. It took more than two years of fastidious preparation before actually beginning to shoot. When he did begin, in March 1965, I went out to interview him.

He immediately roped me in as an extra - a guide who would lead a group of European businessmen out of a coach, through glass doors, sweeping M Hulot with us into a lift. But he then hired me to write the English dialogue for his film. At one point, sitting with him in my writer's caravan (flimsy desk; French typewriter; bottle of whisky with matching couch) I asked him why he had taken the risk of subjecting his delicate gags to the treacherous wastelands of the wide screen. "Why should I," he said "at my age [57] and with my grey hairs, content myself with a little film in black and white about a country railway station, or something like that?"

Tati had folded himself down on to a stool while I sat by the desk awaiting his reaction to my first effort at scriptwriting. Born Jacques Tatischeff, his grandfather had been the Tsar's ambassador to Paris. A child of dispossessed aristocrats, he had the melancholy consolation of being born in Versailles. There was nothing of Hulot's prancing, myopic giraffe about Tati. He was a huge man, an able horseman and a powerful rugby player who affected a sporting swagger. It was doing sketches at rugby dinners that started him on the road to music hall. I was grateful to discover that he had none of the neurotic compulsion to entertain of the professional comedian. He was not melancholic, more a glum, curiously silent man. Everything he did on that set, in that period at least, suggested indecision. He had the air of uncertainty of someone who fears his creativity has run dry. I had already been disturbed by his attempts to brighten up his black and white Jour de Fête, a work that needed no brightening, by colouring the balloons. It smacked of aimless tinkering.

The caravan was on the fringe of a set composed of a central block of glass-fronted offices - a huge empty space surrounded by propped-up skyscraper facades. For days on end, nothing happened out there. Tati would appear in the distance and tinker with something, a door fitting, something on the ground, his production director, M Maurice, tagging along, attentive, tolerant, an air of fatigued resignation. No one else could come to a decision about any detail of the work. On any film set there are large areas of inaction, but always one point of focused activity, where people even act from time to time. Since Tati failed to come to a decision for long periods, his enormous set just waited for him, and so did I, sitting marooned in a coach with a score of wives of American officers from Shape (Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers Europe) that Tati had chosen personally at a Shape dinner party.

The non-French-speaking American wives, whose social life in France was largely limited to the PX (US army cutprice superstore) were at first very chuffed with their adventure, but when the deadening monotony of film work got to them they began to grumble: "I felt all wilted down," said one.

No one was more "wilted down" than the young German au pair girl, Barbara Dennek, whom Tati had signed up as the "co-star" of Playtime. She often waited with us in the coach, and her disillusionment, with more than a touch of sour resentment, became palpable. Whatever illusions she had of a film career had already gone stale by the time I arrived. Contracted to appear throughout the shooting, she never made more than often pointless appearances with hardly a word of dialogue and no comic routines. She didn't know it then, but she still had another couple of years to go.

I was getting nowhere with the script. Tati's brief to me was to write, for a daily rate, a monologue for a scene in which a managing director high up in a glass office presents his annual report while being distracted by M Hulot's antics down below. He does not realise that the wind is blowing the pages back and forwards, making nonsense of what he is saying to his astonished board.

I got the idea of weaving chunks of technical terms from an engineering magazine into the bland clichés of annual reports. Engineering activities - pumping, sluicing and injecting - and the clunkey vocabulary should produce some comical, or at least bizarre, effects, I hoped. The easy option - indecency - was not available in the early 1960s. In any event, sex was not a part of Tati's humorous world.

As Tati sat beside me looking at the pages in gloomy silence, the words I had written down began to assume an ignorant, unyielding character; I felt I had dropped a scrapyard on nimble M Hulot. But he was no help at all as to what might be wrong or even what he really wanted. He just told me to continue and sloped off.

I continued. But I was already fatally infected with indecision and aimlessness. I didn't hit the bottle, but I flirted with it a bit. Things were getting a bit messy on the employment front, too. Wages were about £7 a day for extras and £11 a day for writers. One day I was called back to be an extra again. At least, I thought, I can pass the time in my caravan. But when I asked for the key I was told with classic Parisian brusqueness that the caravan was interdit to extras.

The next time I came back was as a scriptwriter, so I got my caravan back. Daily payments began to be postponed and then I noticed that if I was not watchful I would be given an extra's daily rate instead of my elevated screen writer's fee.

I grew weary of the whole thing, and once I had led the businessmen into the lift I bailed out. I never got to the teeming, knockabout scenes in the night club that occupy the last half of the film. When, more than a year later, they rang for me to come back and help sweep M Hulot, who had finally got out of the lift, I had neither the time nor inclination to return.

Tati didn't use the pumping, sluicing monologue. But neither did my successor Art Buchwald produce an alternative. Tati just left the stub of the scene. The managing director begins to read and says: "Our reserves have been converted to gold." He notices Hulot and - nothing. By the time the lift had arrived at the top I had been vaporised, leaving the businessmen to do the job on their own. The American officers' wives gave him a problem too. They vanished. De Gaulle kicked out Nato; no American servicemen were left after April Fool's day 1967. Playtime was not finished until December.

There are other unresolved jokes in Playtime - notably the restaurant scene couple who have their fish endlessly peppered. The joke about choking on the pepper never comes. Critics have seen a subtle use of the withheld punchline here. I have a more likely explanation: the fish could afford to hang around for a couple of years, but the couple couldn't.

· The Jacques Tati season, featuring M Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, Jour de Fête, and Playtime is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 (020-7928 3232), from August 2, at Chelsea Cinema, London SW3 (020-7351 3742) from August 15, then touring.